


Who You Might Be

by failsafe



Category: Leverage, The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Identity Issues, Mistaken Identity, Multi, Relationship(s), ToT: Chocolate Box, ToT: Trick - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 04:29:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8357230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: What if you wore another person's face?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Karios](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karios/gifts).



> Dear Karios, 
> 
> This is probably the first time I have, in a fic exchange, strayed as far as I feel I have in this fic from Optional Details. I have stayed far away from any of your Do Not Wants, but I just wanted to preface this with a sincere apology if you're at all disappointed. However, I want to explain that I could not decide which of these fandoms I wanted to do (we matched on The Librarians) and since you brought up the idea of _costumes_ , my brain came up with this abstract connection and would not leave me alone. I really, really hope you like it. Happy Halloween!

Jake steps through the door-to-anywhere one day on what was supposed to be a short errand. He steps out into mid-morning air and notes that it smells cool, damp, rainy, and a little like seawater. He won't know it until later, but he has stepped onto a sidewalk in Portland, Oregon, and it is 11:57 on a Sunday morning. All he knows to start with is that he was supposed to be somewhere other than here.

Turning on his heel, he reaches out to open the door magic had temporarily re-purposed to step back through, to get Jenkins to recalibrate the thing, and try again. He has been through this kind of thing enough times not to lose it during the first few seconds of something magical screwing up. He swings the door toward himself, noticing that it is painted red on this side of reality. It stands out starkly against a gray and blue, cool landscape that stretches out damply behind him. When the door opens, rather than seeing the familiar long table, the books, the strange assortment of magical artifacts, or anything he is supposed to see, he sees what looks like a bakery. It smells like one, too. It smells heavenly, actually, but it is exactly the opposite of what he should be seeing. As much as it makes him want to give up on this insanity and see if they've got a good bagel or seven, for a moment he feels his blood pressure skyrocket and he could punch the air where Jenkins' domain should be.

Instead, he almost trips over himself as he has to correct to keep from knocking the forehead of a pretty, blonde woman with the heel of his hand. He smoothy – not so smoothly – diffuses the momentum of his arm and rubs at the back of his head.

“Goddamnit Jenk—and. What?” he asks, realizing that she has no idea who he might be talking to and that she seems to be talking to him in the same, confusing instant. He blinks at her, meets her eyes, and sees something that looks familiar in them. She is not familiar, but that look in her eyes looks bright, warm, knowing, and so full of acceptance that he can only feel very, very homesick for a place he was just two or three minutes ago and the people that sometimes inhabit that weird, weird place where he's been wholly himself for the first time in his life.

“You got your hair cut!” the woman says brightly. She has, in the crook of an arm, an impressive number of very similar loaves of bread in a bag. She seems to have not realized that he is confused.

“... Eh—” he begins, noncommittally.

The woman's brow ticks down a little, her lips pursing a little. With a little movement, her blonde ponytail swings gently.

“I'm not sure I like it,” she comments, authoritatively.

“I... Sorry?” he asks. He hasn't had a haircut in a few weeks, actually, and his face feels a little uncomfortably hot in the face of this woman, this stranger, telling him it apparently doesn't suit him.

“Hair grows back,” she says with a warm and casual mix of assurance and indifference. She glances at the bread in her arms and shifts the weight of it a little. It can't be that heavy but looks a little awkward for one person to carry. She shifts some of it forward as if she intends to hand it off to him.

Every muscle in Jake's body and every gentlemanly impulse he has ever had is ready to help her until something gets a little too weird and makes him act like more of a jerk than he could have been.

“Here,” she says. “Hardison was asleep when I left, and I thought he looked so sweet; I didn't want to wake him,” she rambled on. Then, she checked his eyes, for his compliance, expecting to receive it. “Eliot?” she asks, as if to confirm something.

He dodges her and she just barely rights the half-load of bread back toward her shoulder to keep from dropping it down onto the stoop outside the bakery. He rushes past her, inside, and without really thinking about it, he makes his way to the men's room door.

“Eliot,” calls a confused, tentatively hurt, tentatively worried voice behind Jake. Then, it fades from existence, as the men's room door leads him not into a dingy, blue-tiled bathroom but back into the Annex.

\- - -

A few minutes later, that same day in Portland, Parker stomps into the BrewPub's entrance without regard for the usual niceties of going through the entrance that she usually uses when she's just coming home. She is disgruntled; she walks past the very few customers who are present at noon on a very rainy, cool Sunday and only makes her status as one of the BrewPub's proprietors clear through the way she trudges with the bread behind the counter and behind the scenes to drop it all down on a stainless steel surface. She speaks to the nearest of the few employees they have around to keep the _cover_ element of their business running when they're off doing jobs or sleeping in on rainy Sundays. She smiles tightly, feeling it plastered on like in her earliest days of figuring out how to act... like a person.

“Hey, here's the bread,” she tells him, not bothering to remark about the fact that he's on the clock and still wearing a beanie. It's cold, and it's Portland. “Seen Hardison yet?” she asks.

“Not yet,” the young guy replies, reaching up and touching his beanie. Without thinking, Parker reaches up and gently smacks his hand down.

He looks at her with wide eyes.

“Stop that. And wash your hands before you go back to work,” she says, ordering him in a clipped tone that makes him listen but have no real sense of danger.

  


She isn't actually working, and the bright mood she had volunteered to run out to pick up an order of bread had deflated like a sad, barely pricked balloon. Without ceremony, she wanders off, trusting the help to keep an eye on things like they usually do, like they get paid fairly for, and makes the long journey back to bed. She plops down on the end of it where Hardison starts awake. She thinks he must have been on the edge of waking up anyway, as fast as he responds to her kicking off her shoes and jarring their big mattress. He overreacts, customarily, anyway.

“Hey, woman,” he complains fondly with exaggerated, widened eyes.

She regards him for a second, neutrally, deciding whether she should talk to him about it or not. Then, she lets him see the pouting look that forms, sincerely, on her face.

“I think I'm mad at Eliot,” she confesses, annoyed that she is and more annoyed that he'd given her a reason to be.

“What, babe?” Hardison says, hauling himself into a seated position in a manner of suddenly heightened attentiveness. “What'd he do?”

“He got a haircut,” she says, but then she quickly realizes that this probably isn't the best place to start the story.

“He... You did, man? When?” he calls, and she follows the way he throws his voice, in the direction of the room where there is a really big TV that's all theirs in this place they call home.

“What?” Eliot's voice calls, unassuming and familiar. It sounds strange to Parker's ears because it's _right_ again.

“Parker says you got a bad haircut or something. You get in a fight with the kitchen staff?” Hardison asks, leaning back like having a conversation this loud this soon after waking up is wearing him out again.

“What?” Eliot asks, a little more baffled this time. There is a sound as he gets up and approaches the bedroom. It sounds like he's wearing his socks.

When she can see him, Parker stares at him for a minute.

“I what?” he asks her, a much more familiar, domestic kind of offense forming in his eyes that melts away her anger. What's more distracting, though, is his hair, still touching his ears, still tucked a bit behind them. She blinks a few times. She looks down at his socks and his worn-out jeans that are the only thing he seems to have in common with the Eliot she'd seen at the bakery. “You have a bad dream?” he asks, laughing a little as she's sure the hurt look on her face has diffused into something else. Her mouth hangs open for a second before she can respond.

Still with a little pent up annoyance and hurt that has nowhere to go, she gestures down toward her body.

“I'm dressed!” she protests.

“I can see that,” Eliot says, infuriatingly calm now that he's gotten a jab in.

She glares a little but then decides that she's more relieved than anything that Eliot is still Eliot, Eliot's hair isn't too short, and he hadn't just nearly made her drop perfectly good bread on the sidewalk. She groans in her throat, the whining tone that beckons their – and mostly Hardison's – sympathy.

“I'm going _back_ to bed,” she complains, suddenly convinced that she must be exhausted, must be seeing things, and she tries not to think that means something bad or really weird is about to happen. She flops back into the center of the mattress, arms above her head. It's Sunday, rainy, cold, and she wants a day off.

\- - -

“You guys think Doppelgängers exist?” Jake asks one day, seemingly out of the blue.

Ezekiel looks over at him across the long table, no longer messing with something that looks like a mystical dreidel. Jenkins would tell him to stop when he walked back in the room, but he has found some greater source of amusement than messing with probably pretty benign mystical things in the safety of this familiar room. If it summoned anything unfortunate, he knew the security plans the Library had better than anyone and could lock it up. Probably.

“You mean like a person who looks exactly like you? Clones?” he asks.

“Did you see a movie about them?” Jake asks.

Ezekiel bristles a little, but it's not an entirely unfair response. He just wishes that his initiative to bring easy, relaxing entertainment into their lives wasn't met with such ridicule. It wasn't as if he hadn't learned _some_ of the importance of reading the fine print. It's just that sometimes the movie version is so much faster and more fun.

“Yeah, as a matter of fact—” he starts.

Then, Cassandra interrupts him from where she's sitting, without looking up from the book she's skimming through, possibly because she is interested in the words on the page and possibly because it's pretty. It seems to glow with gilded letters that seem too perfect and too bright but perfectly legible all at once. The golden light touches her face, but only a little. He doesn't know if she's diffusing an argument or has just now caught up to their conversation – or both.

“I mean, theoretically it's possible,” she says. “With magic and everything,” she amends. She turns another page. “I guess with genetics it'd be _possible_ for two people to be born in different locations to have extremely similar DNA, particularly if they were half-siblings spread out over time or... bad decisions... or something,” she continues to ramble on. “And I'm sure there's doubling magic of some kind.” Finally she looks up from her book, first looking to Jake's eyes and then meeting Ezekiel's. She closes the book as if in some kind of distracted reverence. “I mean, we know that... there were other versions of us, right? Versions of us that became _the_ Librarian,” she says.

Jake looks at her and Ezekiel watches for it – any hint of darkening or judgment that he thinks he might even call him on. They should be past all that now. Satisfied after a moment, he doesn't find any reason to think Jake is about to bring up past, first-day betrayals and kinks in the operation.

“... Yeah,” Jake says, and rather than darkening his expression seems to lighten. Lighten as in go almost light-headed.

“You okay, mate?” Ezekiel asks. He reaches up to clap Ezekiel on the back of his shoulder lightly, but he barely touches him before Jake stands up. His hand stays where it is, sliding down over Jake's shoulder blade before he retracts it. He looks up at him. “... Or... not?” he asks, prompting some kind of response.

“I'm okay, I just... thought of something,” he mumbles. Jake looks back at Cassandra, and it's like he's staring at a ghostly form of her, and Ezekiel just knows he doesn't like it. Before he can say something again, though, Jake looks away from both of them and retreats. “I'm going to find Jenkins,” he announces.

“Weird, huh?” Ezekiel asks Cassandra, when they are alone. She has opened up the book again and smiles at him from behind her weird little inverse halo it gives her.

“He'll work it out. Didn't seem _that_ weird to me,” she says, second sentence drier than the first.

“He just doesn't seem like the theorizing type of guy between us,” Ezekiel comments, as if there's a somewhat bigger feather in his cap in that regard. His shoulders may square a little from where he sits, but he glances at the doorway Jake had disappeared through; he's a little worried, no matter how he'd pretend not to be.

“Maybe not,” Cassandra says, not taking any ego-stroking or ego-denying bait at the moment. “Besides, I think we all are starting to rub off on each other,” she says cheerfully, looking up to Ezekiel's eyes for a longer moment, daring him to smirk back at her.

  


It doesn't come up again for ages. It doesn't come up again until Ezekiel had all but forgotten that conversation had ever happened. It doesn't come up again until they are in Dallas, Texas, which might be bigger than Jake's hometown but gives him an entirely new appreciation for what exactly _Texans_ are compared to Jake's roughneck demeanor he has so-often mocked him for. He's earned it well enough, at least. Some of these cowboys have probably never seen a cow, he supposes, but what does he know about this place? It seems alien and utterly boring at once.

“This seems... wrong,” he remarks, once they have worked out where they are. “Jenkins, I thought you were getting better at this,” he says, rhetorically, once they have placed where they are. He shields his eyes against the sun as it glints off a street sign. “It also seems sort of... colonial... racist or something,” he mumbles. “Looking for a chupacabra here,” he says.

“Well, I don't know if goat-eating monsters have a lot of respect for cultural and geopolitical boundaries,” Jake says, as if trying to convince himself that this is the right place. “It's the same general part of... Earth... as you'd think...”

“Aren't you usually the one who can't _stand_ when Jenkins gets it wrong?” Ezekiel challenges, affronted at the lack of someone to share in his moaning.

“It's too hot,” Cassandra complains, mildly, reaching down to dust off her pale forearm as if it will help.

“Yeah,” Ezekiel chimes in, still squinting at this bright place he doesn't want to be and can't think of the slightest interesting thing in sight to steal. It's too hot, as Cassandra said, and he hadn't had time to prepare to rob a bank or anything like that. Besides, they didn't like when he did that. Then, he sees something that makes him give a double take across the road. He sees a man with a dangerous kind of swagger, walking down the street, with keen eyes that are so familiar that it feels sort of embarrassing that he immediately recognizes them as _Jake's_. He glances over at Jake, glances back, and can't spot what he'd seen again.

It is entirely possible that the man had disappeared into a door in the course of a second. It is also entirely possible that Texas is a place no one should go and that he is experiencing a _mirage_ , as he's heard about. Then, something clicks in his brain, and he glances at Cassandra, as if for preternatural support. He comes closer to Jake, enough that it draws Jake's attention and eye contact that is almost startled.

“Did you one-time say something... about Doppelgängers?”

Cassandra leans in from her toes and glances between Ezekiel and Jake. She frowns.

“Is this one of those wrong-case, right-time things?” A second passes. “It is, isn't it?”

\- - -

Parker is a lot more business-oriented and sexy-scary when they're working a job, but in stolen moments out of sight, every time Hardison notices her at peace, he can't help but smile a little. This time, her version of peace is pawing at Eliot's hair, fingers combing through it and tucking the length of it that will fit behind his ear.

“You remember that time I dreamt that you cut your hair really short?” she asks.

“Since I didn't dream it, I don't remember it,” Eliot points out.

Parker frowns.

“Try,” she demands.

Then, Hardison looks down at his computer at their HQ, set up in a hotel room in Dallas.

“Look alive, guys. We gotta roll,” he says. Then, they're off to take some guy's money and give it back to the people he took it from; another city, another day, same basic routine. This one hadn't been all that weird yet.

  


Yet.

  


“Seriously?” Hardison demands as his hands are up. There isn't a gun pointed at him. Instead, it's a sword. A katana, actually, in the hands of a woman with a snake kind of motif going on. He feels like he's in a comic book. He has a feeling he's about to be the damsel-in-distress in this story, and it's a shame because he really had been trying to superhero up to catch up to Parker and Eliot. “Whoa, whoa, back up, lady,” he says, glancing back behind his shoulder for an instant. “I know a couple of people who are really not gonna like what you're doin', and I'm not talkin' bank security guards.” He glances around, wondering where in the hell the bank security guards actually are right now, wondering how they had _so effectively_ distracted them that no one but a bunch of chattering, alarmed bystanders notice a lady holding a guy at katana-point.

“Guys, I just—” a girl's voice says. Her tone is airy, light, and pained. She's walking toward the perimeter that no one else will breech, and Hardison isn't sure where she even came from. The two guys flanking her seem to follow close behind and the white dude tries to reach for her arm and pull her back. She's holding her temples like she has a killer headache, and she wipes her nose abruptly with a sniffle. “I've got—” she says, and she opens up her eyes. She stares at the lady with a katana, at her face more than her sword, and she's way too damn close to Hardison and katana-lady for a girl with little cartoon printed things on her leggings. It seems like the trio at the periphery of Hardison's vision are all kind of dumb, both in the sense of getting too close and in the sense of awestruck or something. Again, the woman is the first to speak. “Lamia,” she says.

“You know her?” Hardison demands, almost rounding on the woman, enough to notice she's got red hair. “You kidding me, Pippi?”

“Okay,” says a much more familiar voice that floods Hardison's heart with relief that it's not about to be pierced and with adoration. Parker without a change of costume but an apparent change of plans repels down from... well, somewhere, and uses some skill Eliot must have taught her to send that katana skidding across the floor. “First of all, only I get to threaten him,” she says.

The woman shows her teeth, but she cannot seem to decide which she wants first – Parker, or the not-very-dangerous-looking redhead.

“You,” she says, to the redhead, as if ignoring Parker is somehow a counter-blow. “How do you know my name?” she demands. Something in her eyes looks uncertain, halting.

It pisses Parker off, apparently, because she's behind her, locking her in a hold, finding Hardison with her eyes, when—Parker loses all her resolve.

She's staring at the redhead, too, then past her.

“You—” she says.

Sword no longer ready to dice him up, Hardison looks around to look at the men accompanying the redhead. One in particular snags his attention helplessly because he sees it, too. For a second, he comes up with rational explanations, but nothing about today has been especially rational.

“Guys, I think this job is pretty well blown unless you've got a _brilliant_ plan,” says a voice in Hardison's ear, and he knows Parker hears it too.

“Holy—” Hardison murmurs.

“You're _not_ Eliot,” Parker accuses the man who looks exactly like him with a much more clean, country-boy haircut.

“... You,” the man says, in Eliot's voice.

Then, the day just keeps on getting weirder...

\- - -

The way the day wraps up and the way _Leverage International_ is not shuddered and screwed for good owes a lot to adrenaline, some mostly-nonlethal blood and sweat, a stranger's tears, and a whole lot of things Eliot doesn't understand. Magic. Bullshit, he wants to say, but he has seen the world, been everywhere, seen its darkest corners. It has to be bullshit, because he has. Maybe it doesn't have to be, because that would be just about the second most _hopeful_ lie he'd ever found out was true. He's dizzy with questions, feels like he needs to talk to Parker and Hardison alone, but doesn't know how they can trust that they even are alone when there's this guy who looks _just like him_ standing there.

In the back of his mind, there's the faintest urge to _kill or be killed_ , but as ready to brawl as this guy looks, Eliot recognizes something in him that he doesn't see when he looks in the mirror. Something he had seen a long time ago. Something he _used_ to see in himself before his life had happened.

This guy is not a killer.

They are back in Portland, six people huddled into the command center that has typically only contained three since Nate and Sophie left to be normal people for a while. The three strangers are sat neatly at the table where he usually sits with Parker, listening to Hardison give briefings.

The redheaded girl looks the most like she might spook at any second, but it is mostly in how she keeps her hands folded and slightly fidgeting in front of her. Her name is Cassandra, and her eyes never stop flitting around like she's looking for everything at once. Every time they fall on him, he knows she's probably the most dangerous between the three of them.

The other kid is the younger one, and he has been bickering with Parker about his status as a world-renowned thief with a frustrated, plaintive tone off and on since the problem at the bank had been solved. She seems to coo at him more than she gets angry, but it swings back and forth like a pendulum, and what is an almost frighteningly maternal Parker gaze switches back to a pissed off cat every few minutes or so. His name is Ezekiel, and he seems to be the kind to make fast friends anywhere. He seems... the most like one of them.

Then, there's the guy who looks just like him. Jake Stone. The only thing that differentiates them is the location of a couple of scars. Even the callouses on their hands might have been mistaken for the same if Eliot had been even a little less familiar with the difference in tools and weapons and the marks they left.

He approaches the table, face-to-face and eye-to-eye with this guy. He squints, not sure if either of them are glaring, but he recognizes that there is nothing in this man that is imitative, and he'd have never mistaken him for a mirror-image, not in a million years.

“What do you do?” he asks, as if he is suddenly very comfortable with smalltalk with this impossible stranger.

“He's a Librarian,” chimes in the Australian kid, keen on everything.

Unexpectedly, Eliot feels himself snort out a laugh. It's derisive, but not directed at anyone in the room, and disbelieving. He looks down at the floor, feeling almost... _disarmed_ ... for a second. He glances at Parker, leaning over the other little self-proclaimed thief, and at Hardison rubbing at his lower lip, staring at their guests like he wants to believe it but thinks it's too _cool_ to be true.

“A librarian,” he repeats. “Work out a lot?” he asks, and for some reason his tone always veers back toward one of confrontation. He doesn't know why.

He can tell that this Jake guy doesn't take to it kindly, but he never perceives even the slightest threat from him.

“Capital 'L,' there, I think,” Jake says, folding his arms – strong, but protecting himself. “There any reason I'm supposed to believe you're not... a ghost... or... some kind of... _thing_ taking on my appearance to hurt somebody?” he counters, mustering courage it seems he's willing to back up. He raises his eyebrows, a demand for any honor Eliot has if ever he had seen one. It feels more effective than any punch he believes this man could have landed, even if they might be matched pound-for-pound of muscle.

“... Like some kind of monster?” he asks, surprised that he's following the line of reasoning. Jake nearly says something else, but Eliot jumps back in before he can. “Yeah, I'm a monster,” he says. He reaches out, hand down on the narrow, long table that's part of a world that's _his_. He's bracing himself to it, somehow. He looks up, his longer-hair moving with the motion. He meets Jake's eyes and sees them ready to move as he glances off to his left, to his _team_ , and Eliot _does_ recognize that look. He sighs, and for a second, he yields, like he might to a kid. “... But not the kind of monster I _think_ you think,” he admits.

“What kind, then?” Jake demands shortly.

“The kind... you become... but might stand a chance of not being one day. I don't know about magic and big-foot,” Eliot says – glancing furtively at Hardison, realizing he's being eavesdropped upon, and Hardison doesn't geek out and so being listened to, so softly, is the most _comforting_ thing that's happened all day. He looks at Jake's eyes again, changes his posture, almost to one of friendliness. He's trying, trying not to curl back around the ache of a punch landed in the center of his chest. “You ever see _Beauty and the Beast_? Like the cartoon,” he says. He moves around the table, then wearily pulls up a fourth chair beside this Jake guy. He doesn't know, but he feels like they ought to talk.

\- - -

“... Parker,” Cassandra says gently, trying out the name conversationally for the first time, after she has been fidgeting with her hands, looking around, seeing, searching, always listening, taking everything in, and anchoring herself with the clasping together of her hands alone. That, and the steady presence of Jake to her right and Ezekiel to her left. She has taken everything in, run it against every calculation and theory she has ever known about this kind of thing, and she thinks Ezekiel is never going to convince this woman that he's a greater thief than her.

“Yeah?” Parker asks, responding in kind to the tone. When they lock eyes, Cassandra feels something cold, something warm, something liquid and perfect envelope her but only in the eye, in the body, in the mind of a _memory_ that lulls her, that scares her to death.

“Did you believe in magic before today?” she asks, trusting that she certainly does now. She has to. Cassandra senses something about it in everything about her, but she doesn't know how she knows it isn't just a trick of the light.

“Magic fingers?” Ezekiel prompts, butting back in, leaning in toward her. She elbows him summarily.

Parker glances down.

“No,” she says, but then she half-shrugs. She looks over at Hardison, reaches out with her hand, and draws him in by it. He takes it, and she seems to breathe again, differently. “... Maybe,” she says. “I always wanted to believe in Santa Claus,” she admits.

“Me too,” Cassandra says, and if she weren't so... arrested by Parker's very appearance, she thinks she might have leapt from her chair and shared the good news.

“Really?” Parker asks, and it's lulling again – a siren song.

“You're not... in a disguise... are you?” Cassandra asks, choosing to trust this woman, even if she doesn't know about the other.

“Me?” Parker chuckles lightly. She glances at Hardison in mock-consideration. “Right now? No. … This is where I live,” she says, then casually pecks Hardison on the cheek. She seems to have completely made peace with this, which might be what makes her answer the most suspect, if anything makes it so, but Cassandra believes her. She believes her, even if just for right now, because she wants to ask her something else.

“So you're not the Lady of the Lake,” Cassandra concludes. She notices that Ezekiel heard her, that Jake probably didn't, and she wonders what to do with that little tidbit of information in the air, floating around them and then gone. Parker takes it as a fantastic joke and laughs happily again.

“What?” she asks, as if begging for a story with only a little restraint.

“You're not,” Cassandra assures her simply, sighing with what might have been a bit heavier than relief. She looks down, fiddles her thumbs together again. She notices Ezekiel watching her do it, but she looks back up at Parker instead, in case she loses her nerve. “I think I know what's going on here,” she remarks.

“Are you gonna tell me? Because—” Ezekiel says, his tone needling as if he's trying to dispel the way she's probably thinking a lot about her Brain Grape, the way she does sometimes. She presses on, interrupting and ignoring him as kindly as she can.

“... If there's two of Jake – Eliot – and two of you... or there were...”

“Are you telling us she's _dead_ in another universe?” Hardison jumps in, drawing Parker close in a way that seems protective but exaggerated, like he wants to make it into a fairy story but can't bear the thought.

“I think she lived a long time ago where I'm from. Maybe she was someone else,” she says, glancing at Jake and the man called Eliot, talking in a bubble of their own that seems tinted in tones of sepia and storm-cloud gray. Then, she looks at Hardison for a second. “I think maybe she's never going to die, really, where I'm from,” she says, the promise of a sad kindness.

“It's not that big a deal. I jump off buildings,” Parker explains to Hardison, seconding the reassurance.

“I think you were one of the Fae... a fairy,” Cassandra shares, then she draws back a little, as if maybe this is unnecessary information.

“Cool!” Parker says, eyes lighting up as she glances at Hardison as if for his reaction and approval. “Tinkerbell!” she exclaims teasingly. This woman, whoever she is, seems so utterly safe, whole, and at home here.

“Something like that,” Cassandra allows, then when she has Parker's attention once more, she continues. “If there are... or were... two of Jake, two of Eliot, two of you... do you think there are two of me?” she asks. She glances over at Ezekiel. “Or him, I mean,” she amends, mostly out of modesty for Ezekiel's sake, rather than these strangers' who don't know of the death sentence in her brain.

“Him? I bet he's in Australia right now,” Parker says toward Ezekiel, a gleeful tease. “Stealing all the kangaroos, mate,” she jokes.

“I don't like her,” Ezekiel complains to Cassandra, insincerely, and he seems like he is consistently, gently, tugging at an invisible coattail, trying to draw her out of a melancholy he does not breech but hates and accepts all at once.

“I don't know how long we'll be here,” Cassandra prefaces, “or where or how _here_ really is, except that it's yours, but you have a lot of resources, right? Ways to find people?” she asks, looking up with timid hope and fear.

Parker and Hardison nod at difference paces in unison. They glance at each other.

“Yeah,” Hardison says.

“We do,” Parker confirms.

“Before I leave, I'd like to see if I exist. Just me. I guess I won't know if I have another name, but... could I just try?” Cassandra asks politely.

“Cass—” Ezekiel says, his trailing off unclear if it's fearful or out of fondness.

“I just want to see,” she promises, meeting his eyes. He looks away from hers and nods, and she is reminded that sometimes – of the three of them – her eyes are the eyes of death.

 


End file.
